Straight half? No. A select 3% a year for five years? Maybe. If you’ve seen any of the realistic critiques of the Thanos snap you know that doesn’t go well. Trimming down the fascists, oligarchs, nationalist, theocrats, tech barons, and similar greed and hate mongers should be enough without crashing everything.
Where in the fuck do you get ecofascism from!? Do you even know what the word means.
"Ecofascism is a political ideology that blends environmental protection with extreme racism, white supremacy, and violence against marginalized groups. "
How about you do the bare minimum reading and take a look at the wikipedia page for ecofascism instead of presenting me with a dictionary definition of the word, which only highlights your obvious ignorance on this topic, and then get back to me when you’re done.
Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive. As the world currently exists, and under current economic systems, population growth is a pretty huge issue, especially while basically zero effort is being put into reducing carbon emissions globally.
There was an article somewhere in these threatlds that gave a decent summary:
The Earth cannot sustain the future human population, or even today’s, without a major overhaul of socio-cultural practices for using land, water, energy, biodiversity, and other resources
What a lot of people (myself included) struggle with is that the amount and significance of change needed to make an actual difference is huge right now, and it requires a concerted global effort to get anywhere close to halting what feels like an inexorable rise in earth’s temperatures.
Until we can change this then humans might as well be described as a virus and looking at forced population control (in this case of transport etc. under covid) and seeing a measurable improvement in our environment feels cathartic and, honestly, easier to obtain than the global overturning of capital.
Define ecofascism then, because its easy to just fuck around and shit on an opinion without providing an alternative.
I’m not saying we need eugenics or a cull., and I’m certainly not blaming the global south for existing in a world that was driven by short sighted rich European capitalists.
What I am saying is:
Population is a problem provided the status quo doesn’t change
The status quo just ain’t changing. Not fast enough, anyway.
In light of this the current state of human existence (and the systems which support it) could be reasonably described as a virus. Exponential growth at the cost of a host? Prove me wrong.
Solutions? Fucking sea change and a total shift in the way we occupy the planet. We’re not over crowding we’re over producing (and over consuming).
What’s eco-fascist about that, and if you don’t agree, please let me know.
Yeah, overpopulation is really easy to handle and doesn’t require violence. Give kids a genuine education that they can continue into adulthood, and access to birth control and reproductive healthcare, and bam, population growth is fixed.
The population problem is intentionally caused by the epstein class, so they can have abundant, desperate, cheap labor.
I felt like this watching Black Panther. The “bad” guy wanted to give Wakanda’s weapons to the oppressed and downtrodden people of the world, and I was like “yeah, sounds good.”
If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been forced their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
But even with these slower rates of growth, our population is already far above the sustainable carrying capacity given by Bradshaw and team’s models.
The gap between their optimum number of 2.5 billion and our current population size of 8.3 billion may help explain the problems with overconsumption our species currently faces.
Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!
The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.
You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!
Reality is malleable. Sure, the current circumstances of how resources are divided and used is reality. The current population is reality. We are both discussing ways in which our reality can be transformed to the benefit of all. Your suggested path involves the death of billions of people, while my suggested path involves some people having slightly less exorbitant lifestyles. Your suggested path is not only extreme, but it wouldn’t even work according to the very scholars you are citing. THAT is reality.
Cars are not inherently necessary. But we built around them and made them necessary. That can change. We control how we build and what assumptions we make.
Yep, cars are not necessary (esp what the vast majority does: one person in a car build for four or more). Public and freight transport would totally work.
If the half of the population includes the part that owns cars perhaps, but the carbon footprint of a person varries greatly. In general the more money someone has the higher the burden they are on the climate.
The problem is mathematically it just doesn’t work. Humans are too good at reproducing. We’d be back in force before too long.
No, the only way is more death note style, taking out billionaires and some of their bootlicking buddies, and those who put profit over the planet’s health. It’s perfectly possible for the rest of us to patch things up—we almost did it with the ozone. (Until guess who decided they wanted to throw money around to force us to stop.)
I think we humans have grown to a population size where anyone’s profit hurting the planets health should be stopped. We need to take protecting the planet’s (in some ways fragile) ecosystem as serious as we take protecting children against abuse for example. Future generations will have to learn or we will find out together what fucking around gets us.
Idk, I feel like targeting living beings is different than targeting structures, even though I know a sudden lack of refined oil would lead to death. I’m just convinced they’ll never stop until their own heat deaths.
I’d go for the quick and painless snap over the long drawn out biotic crisis caused by the removal of a key resource but that’s only because I’m a humanitarian.
The Leftovers is a HBO series about the aftermath of a mysterious event where 5% of the global population disappears. Has nothing to do with climate change or anything, but your suggestions reminds me of this. No matter how little or how many people you snap away, the people left behind will be mourning their loss. Don’t forget also the evil people are someones child or perhaps parent. They have friends, colleagues, relatives etc. You can do an imaginary quick snap that is painless to the person disappearing, but even if you could I don’t think it can be painless for the ones you don’t kill.
4 billion instantaneously without even a chance is just too much for me. At least with the refineries I can lie to myself and say I gave everyone a chance by not immediately removing people from existence.
If you could just snap your fingers and half the world’s population would disappear would you?
We could just behave, we dont need to kill half of everyone.
Straight half? No. A select 3% a year for five years? Maybe. If you’ve seen any of the realistic critiques of the Thanos snap you know that doesn’t go well. Trimming down the fascists, oligarchs, nationalist, theocrats, tech barons, and similar greed and hate mongers should be enough without crashing everything.
Well resource consumption wouldn’t go down THAT much. Outside of private jets and the like, most shit is still consumed by people.
Making it all illegal works, killing the people who make it possible for us does not because new ones will spring up.
Disrupt their established power networks and put the fear of gods in the survivors would go a long way.
I would probably get botox for my chin first and then think about it.
Id just have the wealthiest die 5 billion times
Holy fuck why does Lemmy have so many ecofascists
Where in the fuck do you get ecofascism from!? Do you even know what the word means.
"Ecofascism is a political ideology that blends environmental protection with extreme racism, white supremacy, and violence against marginalized groups. "
How about you do the bare minimum reading and take a look at the wikipedia page for ecofascism instead of presenting me with a dictionary definition of the word, which only highlights your obvious ignorance on this topic, and then get back to me when you’re done.
You are so fucking wrong it isn’t funny. Please tell me your made up definition as you act like an ecotardburger.
Resorting to calling people ecofascists feels pretty reductive. As the world currently exists, and under current economic systems, population growth is a pretty huge issue, especially while basically zero effort is being put into reducing carbon emissions globally.
There was an article somewhere in these threatlds that gave a decent summary:
What a lot of people (myself included) struggle with is that the amount and significance of change needed to make an actual difference is huge right now, and it requires a concerted global effort to get anywhere close to halting what feels like an inexorable rise in earth’s temperatures.
Until we can change this then humans might as well be described as a virus and looking at forced population control (in this case of transport etc. under covid) and seeing a measurable improvement in our environment feels cathartic and, honestly, easier to obtain than the global overturning of capital.
Goes on to describe their definitionally ecofascist beliefs in detail
Overpopulation is a myth started by nazis and eugenicists.
Yeah, you definitely don’t know what that word means.
Also, try telling the civilization of Easter Island overpopulation isn’t a problem. Did you know the Middle East used to be a forest?
No ecofascists here, but I am starting to suspect someone is an ecotard.
Define ecofascism then, because its easy to just fuck around and shit on an opinion without providing an alternative.
I’m not saying we need eugenics or a cull., and I’m certainly not blaming the global south for existing in a world that was driven by short sighted rich European capitalists.
What I am saying is:
What’s eco-fascist about that, and if you don’t agree, please let me know.
Yeah, overpopulation is really easy to handle and doesn’t require violence. Give kids a genuine education that they can continue into adulthood, and access to birth control and reproductive healthcare, and bam, population growth is fixed.
The population problem is intentionally caused by the epstein class, so they can have abundant, desperate, cheap labor.
It’s not like they are welcome in many other places
I was on Thanos’ side the entire time.
I felt like this watching Black Panther. The “bad” guy wanted to give Wakanda’s weapons to the oppressed and downtrodden people of the world, and I was like “yeah, sounds good.”
If I could snap my fingers and have people wake up from the capitalist propaganda they’ve been forced their whole lives, I would. Population is not the issue, it’s a deflection.
Population is definitely an issue there’s no many problem that wouldn’t be instantly solved by going down to a hundred million people.
If your only problem is that you want more resources available for yourself, I can see how you’d come to that conclusion, but you’re wrong. It wouldn’t solve the underlying problems, and in fact it would create a whole set of new ones. Modern civilization depends heavily on economies of scale, and your magic finger snap does nothing to change how resources are produced, distributed, or consumed.
You’re also assuming that every human consumes resources at roughly the same rate. They don’t. Not even close. A tiny fraction of humanity consumes vastly more resources than billions of other people. Your finger snap doesn’t address that inequality at all. The same people and systems that concentrate resources now would simply have an even larger pool of resources to hoover up afterward. Then what? Snap your fingers again?
And follow the logic to its conclusion. If reducing humanity to 100 million “solves” problems because fewer people are consuming resources and competing for them, then 1 million should be even better. Five thousand better still. Ultimately, zero humans means zero poverty, zero war, zero homelessness, zero human carbon emissions, and zero human suffering. Problem solved!
Except obviously it isn’t, because eliminating the people who experience a problem is not the same thing as solving the problem for those people.
We don’t have billions of people living in poverty because there simply isn’t enough stuff on Earth to go around. We have enormous disparities in who controls resources and who gets to consume them. Fantasizing about eliminating most of humanity while leaving that system completely intact makes you a stooge for the oligarchs.
Earth’s Population Has Surpassed The Planet’s Capacity, Study Suggests
Did you actually read what you provided? It’s really not the defense of your point that you are making it out to be. Lead author, Corey Bradshaw (Who also co-authored Human Population Reduction is Not a Quick Fix for Environmental Problems), argues that our current consumption system is unsustainable. I couldn’t agree more!
The 2.5 billion figure cited within is not some immutable physical limit on the number of human bodies Earth can contain. The authors explicitly acknowledge that a “sustainable” population depends on things like standard of living, economics, social conditions, and resource consumption. Their ecological-footprint estimate of 2.35 billion specifically assumes today’s average material standard of living and current consumption distribution, including the enormous consumption of the wealthiest people.
You’re taking a model of how many people our planet can sustainably support under particular socioeconomic and consumption conditions and treating it as evidence that the people themselves are the fundamental problem. That’s not what the evidence shows, though. Not even the evidence you yourself brought to the table, sorry!
It’s a number of people that the planet can carry based on reality.
Reality is malleable. Sure, the current circumstances of how resources are divided and used is reality. The current population is reality. We are both discussing ways in which our reality can be transformed to the benefit of all. Your suggested path involves the death of billions of people, while my suggested path involves some people having slightly less exorbitant lifestyles. Your suggested path is not only extreme, but it wouldn’t even work according to the very scholars you are citing. THAT is reality.
Sounds good enjoy your fairy tale take on the world I’ll stick with the reality we’re living in.
*Starts dancing flamenco
If I could snap my fingers and all the world’s billionaires disappear I would, or oil refineries. Not people though. Humans aren’t the virus.
Snap for all the cars to disappear!
No. People would starve to death. Cars are necessary. Not everyone lives in the CBD of the capital city.
Cars are not inherently necessary. But we built around them and made them necessary. That can change. We control how we build and what assumptions we make.
Yep, cars are not necessary (esp what the vast majority does: one person in a car build for four or more). Public and freight transport would totally work.
Getting rid of half the population or half the refineries would accomplish the same thing right?
If the half of the population includes the part that owns cars perhaps, but the carbon footprint of a person varries greatly. In general the more money someone has the higher the burden they are on the climate.
Oil is used in the production and transportation of food.
Also fertilizer.
And the plastic that keeps the medical system running.
My point is only that not every person on the world has equal access to those things.
My point is those oil refineries keep a lot of people alive.
Be a fanboy then, I think they’re doing a lot of damage despite that.
Not to mention the oil CEOs are directly responsible for delaying and inhibiting the transition to green energy
They don’t refine oil for people to consume it, they refine oil to generate shareholder value.
Do they just dump it in a big hole and profit?
Probably, I don’t know.
The problem is mathematically it just doesn’t work. Humans are too good at reproducing. We’d be back in force before too long.
No, the only way is more death note style, taking out billionaires and some of their bootlicking buddies, and those who put profit over the planet’s health. It’s perfectly possible for the rest of us to patch things up—we almost did it with the ozone. (Until guess who decided they wanted to throw money around to force us to stop.)
I think we humans have grown to a population size where anyone’s profit hurting the planets health should be stopped. We need to take protecting the planet’s (in some ways fragile) ecosystem as serious as we take protecting children against abuse for example. Future generations will have to learn or we will find out together what fucking around gets us.
Idk, I feel like targeting living beings is different than targeting structures, even though I know a sudden lack of refined oil would lead to death. I’m just convinced they’ll never stop until their own heat deaths.
Just the collapse of the medical system alone due to the missing plastics would kill millions.
You can make plastics out of corn and soybean oil
Aye, so its a rock and a hard place then. At least when it comes to solutions like these.
I’d go for the quick and painless snap over the long drawn out biotic crisis caused by the removal of a key resource but that’s only because I’m a humanitarian.
The Leftovers is a HBO series about the aftermath of a mysterious event where 5% of the global population disappears. Has nothing to do with climate change or anything, but your suggestions reminds me of this. No matter how little or how many people you snap away, the people left behind will be mourning their loss. Don’t forget also the evil people are someones child or perhaps parent. They have friends, colleagues, relatives etc. You can do an imaginary quick snap that is painless to the person disappearing, but even if you could I don’t think it can be painless for the ones you don’t kill.
4 billion instantaneously without even a chance is just too much for me. At least with the refineries I can lie to myself and say I gave everyone a chance by not immediately removing people from existence.
Without a second thought